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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
As the new documentary “Darfur Now” makes clear, the genocide occurring inside the North African country of Sudan is very closely connected to what is occurring outside of it—at least from the perspective of director Ted Braun.
In 90 minutes, Braun manages to weave together a globe of shared concern and pain between six people living very disparate lives—from the abject poor of Sudan to movie star Don Cheadle, who is also a co-producer of the film. We meet dozens of Sudanese men, women and children who have fled from their homes and from marauding bands of primarily Arab militia called the Janjaweed, who are believed to have killed at least 200,000 people since 2003 in this northwest region of the country.
Crowded into displacement camps, where they still aren’t safe from militia, the people of Darfur—even little children— speak with bloodshot eyes about murder, rape, the theft of their possessions and their homes being burned to the ground. Elders inquire about who will bury hundreds of corpses left behind in razed villages.
There are two residents of Darfur that we get now better than others: Hejewa Adam tells us in gripping detail of how she was once married with an infant son, who was killed by the Janjaweed, when they beat her while her baby was still on her back. Ahmed Mohammed Abakar, a sheik or leader at one of the camps, tells of losing his home and family to the Janjaweed, until he discovered his young son and daughter wandering a nearby road. “I cried for three days,” he says. “I thought I was going to lose my mind.”
These voices and journeys are interspersed with those of: Cheadle, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, presecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague; Pablo Recalde, who leads the World Food Program in the region and Adam Sterling, a former UCLA student who spearheaded a drive to have California divest its public funds from companies or interests dong business in Sudan.
“Darfur Now” also gives a good history of the conflict, though you might miss it if you blink. (or try to take notes in the dark). The conflict dates back to March 2003 when predominantly Muslim militants fought against government forces and installations in the western regions of the Sudan. The militants accused the government of President Omar al-Bashir of oppressing Black Africans in favor of Arabs. On one side of the conflict is the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed, recruited mostly from
Arab Baggara nomad tribes, (who want to move with their livestock further south to land now occupied by Black farming communities). On the other side are a variety of rebel groups, recruited primarily from the land-tilling Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit Black ethnic groups. The Sudanese government, while denying that it supports the Janjaweed, has provided money and assistance to the militia and has participated in attacks targeting tribes from which the rebels draw support. In one pivotal scene, we watch Moreno-Ocampo survey evidence of the government’s complicity in an attack.
The result is a narrative that is kept in constant motion—literally—from Darfur, to Los Angeles, to New York, to the Netherlands. Time is of the essence and, in the course of the narrative, we witness the triumphs and setbacks of those we are following. This is a particular approach to the subject, which does not provide an unwavering study of Darfur but does bring us up-to-date about the global effort of groups and individuals, including Cheadle’s buddy George Clooney, to stop the killing and suffering now.
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